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Sunday, February 6, 2011

What If You Were Wrong?

This is one of the questions that nagged me in the back of my mind ever since I went to yeshivah: how do we know we are right and all the others wrong? It would be quite an accident for us to be right amongst all these thousands of different belief systems.

If you think of it, if there is only one true belief system, the vast majority of religions will always be wrong. And every religion has a reason why they are right and all the others are wrong.

Dawkins brought his point across rather clear here:

Buying David Gottlieb's book 'Living up to the Truth' on Torah Min Hashamayim never managed to convince me. What is your excuse for believing in exactly the same thing your parents believed in?

Anyone and everyone can always be wrong, it's not limited to religious issues. Politics are the other big one. My answer is trying to treat everyone with respect, and not assuming or inferring stupidity or for failing to agree with me.

Mutual enter of gravity is not the same as geocentrism though. For the sun to literally orbit the earth the solar system would not even function the same. You have the moon and other planetary orbits that the sun is now crossing into. Unless you go back to a Ptolemy system.

The only reason they believe this stuff is because the Torah gets it wrong stating that the earth is fixed and the sun moves can be stopped in the sky.

About the topic. The biggest problem is that people compartmentalize their own belief systems as unique and somehow superior. I became an atheist not because of science, but because I was interested in other belief systems and earlier mythologies. The deeper you dig with any religious belief system you begin to make connections to earlier belief systems. You begin to realize that those other belief systems are similar in many ways and don't have the evidence that your religion also doesn't have. The texts are clearly man made, full of contradictions, and some disgusting things clearly not divine.

The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel by Mark Smith; The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein; Did God Have a Wife? by William Dever; The Hebrew Goddess by Raphael Patai; The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts by Mark Smith; Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel by Frank Moore Cross; Canaanite Myths and Legends by John Gibson; Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others by Stephanie Dalley.

Babylonian and Canaanite mythology is always a good bet. There were other smaller influences as well like the Hittites. The Temple at Ain Dara which has some remains still standing today is supposed to be remarkably like Solomon's Temple.

I know we briefly discussed Friedman's books in another section before so no need to mention them again.

The mutual center of orbit of the earth and sun is so deep within the sun, that it causes an infinitesimal wobble in the sun. Consequently it's fair to say that the earth orbits the sun. The geocentric model of the universe is total hogwash.

Anything? They were Christians so you only ditched like 20% of the same "holy" book and one crappy messiah. That's not exactly the biggest leap. An American jumping from Christianity to Judaism, oh how earth shattering.

"You have a yiddishe neshama" - I am Jewish but the existence of a neshama or an afterlife has never been proven. Hey, been FFB and at some point in time you discover it is all fake, just all the other organized religions.